On Reading Fast and Reading Slow
Beth Kephart
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I wrote before I read. Fast. Then I read and I could not read fast enough. I read, at first, for the facts: Ultimately science derives from the legacy of Greek philosophy… No more in Mendel’s case than in Darwin’s, however, did science have to do with a lucky strike… At the age of thirteen, Faraday was apprenticed to a bookseller. Up and down a South Carolina beach I went, Charles Coulston Gillispie’s The Edge of Objectivity prised open in my hands, the sun beating down, the sand blowing in, the seabirds squawking overhead, the facts like a hunger I couldn’t assuage, for what I didn’t know was everything and what I could know was here, in this book, and there, in the next, and in all the books after that, which I could not read fast enough, and which later I hardly remembered, for having read them all so fast. The facts obliterating the facts. Click here to continue reading.
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Interview with Amy Monticello and Jason Tucker
Heidi Czerwiec
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Heidi Czerwiec: To begin, what was the instigating moment for you? What need do you see this text fulfilling? Or, asked another way, in what ways do you see this guidebook providing an option that wasn’t previously available?
Amy Monticello and Jason Tucker: Those craft texts are all built on deeper philosophies of how CNF works, and many of them do include brief analyses, but they are written for other writers to develop their craft. We found that there is a lot of scholarship on CNF texts, but it tends to focus on individual forms (like the essay or memoir) or subgenres (like true crime or addiction memoir), rather than looking for patterns common across all of those categorizations. Those are about depth. To find the breadth you’d expect from an introductory overview, we collected voices from a range of different literary specializations that otherwise might not have been speaking so directly to each other. We both come from a craft-focused, CNF-writer background, but our other influences from rhetoric and composition gave us ways of considering how CNF writers across all these different categories told true life stories in order to define and create themselves, their communities, their country. The biggest unifying thing we found in writing this introduction is that life writing is an act of democracy. Click here to continue reading. |
The Power of Other Voices in Creative Nonfiction
Mimi Schwartz
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One person, alone, is looking at the world through a single lens of experience, and if that lens is too narrow, readers get suspicious: Why should I believe you? What about this or that? Or even worse, So what? The longer the story, the more need for credibility.
That’s a good thing, I’ve found. Keeping these questions in mind keeps us honest and less likely to sound like a know-it all (always a turn-off). They encourage us to widen the lens of our storytelling by testing our version of story, forcing us also to consider: Would other people that appear in my story agree? What about readers who have had similar experiences? Two strategies I rely on for addressing these questions both involve voice: first, to find the right voice to tell a particular story; second, to bring in other voices that both inform and challenge my voice. Click here to continue reading. |
Interview with Edvidge Giunta
Julija Sukys
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Julija Sukys: I can’t remember the last time I came across creative work that interfaced with labor movements, unions, and activists in the way Talking to the Girls does. The way that you draw a line from 1911 to today is very impressive. The book does this organically (or so it feels to the reader), and it makes a direct connection between the working conditions of New York’s female garment workers more than a century ago to those of garment workers in Bangladesh today (the Bangladeshi activist Kalpona Akter, whom you refer to above, appears as a kind of touchstone figure in the book). Talk about this connection that you and your contributors have made and of tackling labor and international labor movements as a literary theme.
Edvidge Giunta: Talking to the Girls is anchored to the legacy of the Triangle fire as living history—and labor is at the center of this history. While the structure of the book kept morphing, we always knew it would end with Kalpona Akter, with her experiences as a child garment worker and a leader of the Bangladeshi labor movement whose voice resonates internationally. Disasters like the Tazreen Factory fire and the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh are terrifyingly reminiscent of the Triangle fire. Kalpona’s words at the Triangle fire centennial in New York City—“In Bangladesh it’s not 2011. It’s 1911”—exemplify that direct line that connects Triangle with today’s factory workers, especially in developing countries. The history of labor is the story—the stories—of people, of families, of communities. There is poetry in these stories, and the genre of the personal essay allows for the expression of that poetry, not only in the lyrical essays of poets who had written Triangle fire poetry, like Paola Corso and Annie Lanzillotto, but in many of the essays, like the essay of Richard Joon Yoo, whose initial task was to write an essay as a member of the two-architect team that designed the Triangle Fire Memorial. As his essay took shape, it incorporated a meditation on his memories as the child of Korean immigrants. We encouraged our contributors to slow down the writing in key moments, and to rely on strategies of memoir such as scene, summary, and reflection. We were constantly looking for openings, for what had been left unspoken, unexplored, or too compressed in the essays—for what remained unknown. As editors and contributors, we developed such reciprocal respect and trust in the process. We understood that this book was asking us to undertake together a profoundly affecting and transformative journey. The essays do not simply recount—they evoke and reflect, they create echoes and connections; they acknowledge the void of the forgotten, the pull to remember, the struggle to find a form to articulate intergenerational trauma, the power of questions doomed to remain unanswered. Click here to continue reading. |